Your monthly non-spammy-gif-heavy newsletter from your friends at oio.

Talking to things that talk

You're reading the June edition of oio's newsletter. A virtual summer postcard where we share updates, news, events and speculations from a not-too-distant future. This month we have been busy having a break before a hot summer of work, while finally planning some fun activities for our local community.

Most of us were at sea, contemplating wether to eat octopus or not, after watching this documentary, and ultimately ended up trying to talk to other cephalopods too.

octopus bro

Oio News! 🗞

Some news from the oio space.

Generative prints workshop

We are organizing a one-day workshop to experiment with printers and artificial intelligence, right here in the oio London laboratory, on the 30th of July.

That's right - we are finally opening our doors after months of isolation. We hope for this event to be the first in a longer series of public workshops, talks and activities. Register here.

Half human, half machine studios talk

Last week our own Simone Rebaudengo had a talk as part of 24H Worldwide Design Conversations, a global live streamed event organised by Politecnico di Milano. The event was a continuous 24-hour live broadcast, where an uncountable number of designer from around world shared their own visions of the present and future of the practice of design. Simone shared our love for Roby, and some of our own philosophy of co-designing with algorithms as one possible and very juicy way forward. We love being Centaurs.

Here you can find Simone's blurb and here all the other blurbs discussed by the participants.

A video is also coming soon, join our Discord to get the hottest updates 🥵.

⚡️ Oio Thoughts

The language of things

You can buy a cat but you can't make it purr.

During our break, freed from work discussions and with plenty of time to ponder, we started thinking about Neuralink. Why? Who knows, maybe because it always happens to receive a Twitter notification from Elon Musk while on holidays.

The long term vision of Neuralink is to “expand how we interact with each other, with the world, and with ourselves”. In more plain and practical terms that means circumventing traditional ways of interaction such as speech or gestures and instead allowing humans to communicate entirely with their minds. In other words - telepathy.

Brain to brain communication and cybernetic simulations is not a new research area. (Look at this formerly classified CIA report released in 2004 about Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology research). So it’s probably worth being a bit aware of “old wine in new bottles”, albeit with a less totalitarian flavour.

Anyway - If Neuralink succeeds then we’ll be able to communicate with each other, with machines and with other life forms without language. Which makes us think of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Citing dead philosophers rarely goes well and I can in no way claim to fully understand what he means when he writes things like: “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” or “If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.”

At this point you might ask yourself why do these half baked ramblings appear in our newsletter?

Well, a lot of our work is about designing personalities, languages and interactions for emerging technologies and AI in particular. Which sometimes is about asking the question: “What would this thing say if it could speak?”. Which brings me to where I want to end this piece - a few questions that I’ve been thinking about.

If we accept Wittgenstein's view of language as a meaning maker what will happen to our understanding of the world when we all get Neuralink implants?
If we design things with personalities and language, will they actually take on what is given to them?
Will we be able to understand them if we can interface directly through a Brain Machine Interface?
In what ways will their perception of the world be different from ours?

🌐 Oio Community Links

Our Discord community is growing, we are now almost 300 people. Discord is where we announce things before any other channel - workshops, drops and job ads. If you want to stay tuned with the hottest news from oio, make sure to smash this JOIN link.

Here some cherry-picked links for you: